Cybernetics
is the interdisciplinary study of the structure of complex systems, especially
communication processes, control mechanisms and feedback principles. Cybernetics
is closely related to control theory and systems theory.

Example
of cybernetic thinking. On the one hand a company is approached as a system in
an environment. On the other hand cybernetic factory can be modeled as a control
system.

Contemporary cybernetics
began as an interdisciplinary study connecting the fields of control systems,
electrical network theory, mechanical engineering, logic modeling, evolutionary
biology and neuroscience in the 1940s.

Other
fields of study which have influenced or been influenced by cybernetics include
game theory, system theory (a mathematical counterpart to cybernetics), psychology
(especially neuropsychology, behavioral psychology, cognitive psychology), philosophy,
and architecture.[1]

Overview

The
term cybernetics stems from the Greek (kybernetes, steersman, governor,
pilot, or rudder the same root as government). Cybernetics is a broad field of
study, but the essential goal of cybernetics is to understand and define the functions
and processes of systems that have goals, and that participate in circular, causal
chains that move from action to sensing to comparison with desired goal to action.
Studies of this field are all ultimately means of examining different forms of
systems and applying what is known to make the design and function of any system,
including artificial systems such as business management, more efficient and effective.

Norbert
Wiener

Cybernetics
was defined by Norbert Wiener, in his book of that title, as the study of control
and communication in the animal and the machine. Stafford Beer called it the science
of effective organization and Gordon Pask extended it to include information flows
"in all media" from stars to brains. It includes the study of feedback, black
boxes and derived concepts such as communication and control in living organisms,
machines and organizations including self-organization. Its focus is how anything
(digital, mechanical or biological) processes information, reacts to information,
and changes or can be changed to better accomplish the first two tasks [2].
A more philosophical definition, suggested in 1956 by Louis Couffignal, one of
the pioneers of cybernetics, characterizes cybernetics as "the art of ensuring
the efficacy of action" [3].
The most recent definition has been proposed by Louis Kauffman, President of the
American Society for Cybernetics, "Cybernetics is the study of systems and processes
that interact with themselves and produce themselves from themselves" [4].

Concepts
studied by cyberneticists (or, as some prefer, cyberneticians) include, but are
not limited to: learning, cognition, adaption, social control, emergence, communication,
efficiency, efficacy and interconnectivity. These concepts are studied by other
subjects such as engineering and biology, but in cybernetics these are removed
from the context of the individual organism or device.

Other
fields of study which have influenced or been influenced by cybernetics include
game theory; system theory (a mathematical counterpart to cybernetics); psychology,
especially neuropsychology, behavioral psychology,cognitive psychology; philosophy;
anthropology and even architecture.

History

The
Roots of Cybernetic theory

The
word cybernetics was first used in the context of "the study of self-governance"
by Plato in The Laws to signify the governance of people. The words govern and
governor are related to the same Greek root through the Latin cognates gubernare
and gubernator. The word "cybernatique" was also used in 1834 by the physicist
Andre-Marie Ampere (177-1836) to denote the sciences of government in his classification
system of human knowledge.

James
Watt

The
first artificial automatic regulatory system, a water clock, was invented by the
mechanician Ktesibios. In his water clocks, water flowed from a source such as
a holding tank into a reservoir, then from the reservoir to the mechanisms of
the clock. Ktesibios's device used a cone-shaped float to monitor the level of
the water in its reservoir and adjust the rate of flow of the water accordingly
to maintain a constant level of water in the reservoir, so that it neither overflowed
nor was allowed to run dry. This was the first artificial truly automatic self-regulatory
device that required no outside intervention between the feedback and the controls
of the mechanism. Although they did not refer to this concept by the name of Cybernetics
(they considered it a field of engineering), Ktesibios and others such as Heron
and Su Song are considered to be some of the first to study cybernetic principles.

The
study of teleological mechanisms (from the Greek or telos for end,
goal, or purpose) in machines with corrective feedback dates
from as far back as the late 1700s when James Watt's steam engine was equipped
with a governor, a centripetal feedback valve for controlling the speed of the
engine. Alfred Russel Wallace identified this as the principle of evolution in
his famous 1858 paper. In 1868 James Clerk Maxwell published a theoretical article
on governors, one of the first to discuss and refine the principles of self-regulating
devices. Jakob von Uexell applied the feedback mechanism via his model of functional
cycle (Funktionskreis) in order to explain animal behaviour and the origins
of meaning in general.

The Early 20th century

Contemporary
cybernetics began as an interdisciplinary study connecting the fields of control
systems, electrical network theory, mechanical engineering, logic modeling, evolutionary
biology and neuroscience in the 1940s. Electronic control systems originated with
the 1927 work of Bell Telephone Laboratories engineer Harold S. Black on using
negative feedback to control amplifiers. The ideas are also related to the biological
work of Ludwig von Bertalanffy in General Systems Theory.

Early
applications of negative feedback in electronic circuits included the control
of gun mounts and radar antenna during World War Two. Jay Forrester, a graduate
student at the Servomechanisms Laboratory at MIT during WWII working with Gordon
S. Brown to develop electronic control systems for the U.S. Navy, later applied
these ideas to social organizations such as corporations and cities as an original
organizer of the MIT School of Industrial Management at the MIT Sloan School of
Management. Forrester is known as the founder of System Dynamics.

W.
Ross Ashby

W.
Edwards Deming, the Total Quality Management guru for whom Japan named its top
post-WWII industrial prize, was an intern at Bell Telephone Labs in 1927 and may
have been influenced by network theory. Deming made "Understanding Systems" one
of the four pillars of what he described as "Profound Knowledge" in his book "The
New Economics."

Numerous
papers spearheaded the coalescing of the field. In 1935 Russian physiologist P.K.
Anokhin published a book in which the concept of feedback ("back afferentation")
was studied. The Romanian scientist Ştefan Odobleja published Psychologie
consonantiste (Paris, 1938), describing many cybernetic principles. The study
and mathematical modelling of regulatory processes became a continuing research
effort and two key articles were published in 1943. These papers were "Behavior,
Purpose and Teleology" by Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener, and Julian Bigelow;
and the paper "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity" by
Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts.

Cybernetics
as a discipline was firmly established by Wiener, McCulloch and others, such as
W. Ross Ashby and W. Grey Walter.

Walter
was one of the first to build autonomous robots as an aid to the study of animal
behaviour. Together with the US and UK, an important geographical locus of early
cybernetics was France.

In
the spring of 1947, Wiener was invited to a congress on harmonic analysis, held
in Nancy, France. The event was organized by the Bourbaki, a French scientific
society, and mathematician Szolem Mandelbrojt (1899-1983), uncle of the world-famous
mathematician Benot Mandelbrot.

During this stay
in France, Wiener received the offer to write a manuscript on the
unifying character of this part of applied mathematics, which is
found in the study of Brownian motion and in telecommunication engineering.
The following summer, back in the United States, Wiener decided
to introduce the neologism cybernetics into his scientific theory.
The name cybernetics was coined to denote the study of "teleological
mechanisms" and was popularized through his book Cybernetics,
or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine (Hermann
& Cie, Paris, 1948). In the UK this became the focus for the
Ratio Club.

In
the early 1940's John von Neumann, although better known for his work in mathematics
and computer science, did contribute a unique and unusual addition to the world
of cybernetics: Von Neumann cellular automata, and their logical follow up the
Von Neumann Universal Constructor. The result of these deceptively simple thought-experiments
was the concept of self replication which cybernetics adopted as a core concept.
The concept that the same properties of genetic reproduction applied to social
memes, living cells, and even computer viruses is further proof of the somewhat
surprising universality of cybernetic study.

Wiener
popularized the social implications of cybernetics, drawing analogies between
automatic systems (such as a regulated steam engine) and human institutions in
his best-selling The Human Use of Human Beings : Cybernetics and Society
(Houghton-Mifflin, 1950).

While
not the only instance of a research organization focused on cybernetics, the Biological
Computer Lab at the University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign, under the direction
of Heinz von Foerster, was a major center of cybernetic research for almost 20
years, beginning in 1958.

The
Fall and Rebirth of Cybernetics

For
a time during the past 30 years, the field of cybernetics followed a boom-bust
cycle of becoming more and more dominated by the subfields of artificial intelligence
and machine-biological interfaces (ie. cyborgs) and when this research fell out
of favor, the field as a whole fell from grace.

In
the 1970s new cybernetics has emerged in multiple fields, first in biology. Some
biologists influenced by cybernetic concepts (Maturana and Varela, 1980); Varela,
1979; Atlan, 1979) realized that the cybernetic metaphors of the program upon
which molecular biology had been based rendered a conception of the autonomy of
the living being impossible. Consequently, these thinkers were led to invent a
new cybernetics, one more suited to the organizations which mankind discovers
in nature - organizations he has not himself invented. The possibility that this
new cybernetics could also account for social forms of organization, remained
an object of debate among theoreticians on self-organization in the 1980s.[5]

In
political science, Project Cybersyn attempted to introduce a cybernetically controlled
economy during the early 1970s. In the 1980s, unlike its predecessor, the new
cybernetics concerns itself with the interaction of autonomous political actors
and subgroups, and the practical and reflexive consciousness of the subjects who
produce and reproduce the structure of a political community. A dominant consideration
is that of recursiveness, or self-reference of political action both with regards
to the expression of political consciousness and with the ways in which systems
build upon themselves.[6]

Geyer
and van der Zouwen in 1978 discussed a number of characteristics of the emerging
"new cybernetics". One characteristic of new cybernetics is that it views information
as constructed and reconstructed by an individual interacting with the environment.
This provides an epistemological foundation of science, by viewing it as observer-dependent.
Another characteristic of the new cybernetics is its contribution towards bridging
the "micro-macro gap". That is, it links the individual with the society. Geyer
and van der Zouwen also noted that a transition from classical cybernetics to
the new cybernetics involves a transition from classical problems to new problems.
These shifts in thinking involve, among others, a change from emphasis on the
system being steered to the system doing the steering, and the factor which guides
the steering decisions. And a new emphasis on communication between several systems
which are trying to steer each other.[7]

Recent endeavors
into the true focus of cybernetics, systems of control and emergent
behavior, by such related fields as Game Theory (the analysis
of group interaction), systems of feedback in evolution, and Metamaterials
(the study of materials with properties beyond the newtonian properties
of their constituent atoms), have led to a revived interest in
this increasingly relevant field.[2]

In Biology

Cybernetics
in biology is the study of cybernetic systems present in biological organisms,
primarily focusing on how animals adapt to their environment, and how information
in the form of genes is passed from generation to generation[8].
There is also a secondary focus on cyborgs.

Thermal
image of a cold-blooded tarantula on a warm-blooded human hand

In
Computer Science

Computer
science directly applies the concepts of cybernetics to the control of devices
and the analysis of information.

Jean-Pierre Dupuy, "The autonomy of social reality: on the contribution of systems
theory to the theory of society" in: Elias L. Khalil & Kenneth
E. Boulding eds., Evolution, Order and Complexity, 1986.

Note:
this does not refer to the concept of Racial
Memory but to the concept of cumulative adaptation to a particular niche,
such as the case of the pepper
moth having genes for both light and dark environments.